Once-Calming Leader and a Stunning Turn

WASHINGTON — J. Dennis Hastert was propelled to power in Congress by one sex scandal only to see his House majority dragged down by another. Now the former speaker is himself caught in a murky criminal episode with dark overtones and sexual allegations.

It is an astounding trajectory for a mild-mannered, lumbering Midwesterner who governed the House at a tumultuous time of terrorism, war and ethical failures. He was catapulted from almost nowhere to be speaker in 1998 after the first choice acknowledged extramarital affairs and abruptly abandoned his bid for the speakership on the House floor during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

Reeling House Republicans immediately rallied around “Denny” Hastert, 73, precisely because he was a safe choice, a regular guy, a team player, someone who wouldn’t get in trouble like Robert Livingston, the front-runner from Louisiana who stepped aside. To many colleagues, the calm Mr. Hastert was a welcome respite after their turbulent ride alongside Newt Gingrich.

“He was the coach,” said Representative Peter T. King, a New York Republican and a longtime Hastert ally who, like most who served with Mr. Hastert, expressed amazement at Thursday’s indictment of the man from rural Illinois who presided over the House from 1999 to 2007. “He was a solid guy, he never raised his voice. This has really come out of nowhere.”

Mr. King’s sentiments and shock are shared by many others who knew and served with Mr. Hastert. Privately, Republicans and some Democrats expressed a degree of sadness that the extraordinary political career of Mr. Hastert would end in disgrace along with no small amount of anger and bewilderment at the accusations about the former speaker’s conduct before he had been elected to Congress and his apparent harboring of a secret past.

Mr. Hastert’s indictment on bank-related charges from paying large sums of money — sums presumably earned during his lucrative post-Congress lobbying career — in compensation for allegations of past sexual misconduct seems unconnected to his House service. But he is not the first from the Hastert era in the House to find himself in legal jeopardy.

Mr. Hastert’s tenure coincided with the rise and fall of Jack Abramoff, the well-connected lobbyist who went to prison for corruption, along with former Representatives Bob Ney of Ohio and Duke Cunningham of California, two Hastert contemporaries who also ended up behind bars. Tom DeLay, the take-no-prisoners Texan who was a Hastert mentor and helped him secure the speakership, left amid an ethical cloud and an indictment, though his conviction was later overturned. Bipartisan abuse of the earmark process got so bad that such pet projects are now banned.

But Mr. Hastert was not seen as a man who countenanced criminality. He was viewed more as a speaker who could rein in Mr. DeLay and successfully push the House Republican agenda by employing what became known as the Hastert rule — the notion that the key to controlling the unruly House was that legislation must pass with a majority of the majority.

Mr. Hastert and Mr. DeLay, who became majority leader, were not afraid to muscle the House, perhaps most famously in the three-hour vote in November 2003 to pass the new Medicare prescription drug plan. They twisted arms and promised favors in a bold and brutal display on the House floor that would ultimately lead to ethics rebukes for Mr. DeLay and others.

But Mr. Hastert, who lost weight and became more fit after he left Congress, was not admonished and remained a fixture moving through the hallways of the House with his aides in tow. He could be gruff and conveyed little patience or interest in dealing with the news media.

“I always had a kind of old coaching philosophy,” he once told an Illinois publication, “if a coach is in the headlines every week, the team’s in trouble. “

At the same time, Mr. Hastert showed the sort of Middle America sensibilities that had him slowing to open doors for others — much to the frustration of his own waiting security detail.

He delivered for both his colleagues and President George W. Bush, whom Mr. Hastert met with multiple times a week in busy stretches.

“We got stuff done,” said former Representative Tom Davis of Virginia, a top political strategist for House Republicans in the Hastert years. “Congress had its issues as it does today, but it was a functional Congress. He’d get the trains moved.”

The Sept. 11 attacks — and the possibility that the Capitol itself was a target of Flight 93 that was brought down by passengers in Pennsylvania — turned Mr. Hastert into a hard-line conservative on national security issues, and he happily and aggressively pressed President Bush’s agenda on antiterrorism measures and the Iraq war.

But public dissatisfaction with the war eventually took its toll as Democrats pushed their case with increasing success against a House Republican regime that was becoming exhausted both ethically and legislatively by 2006. The final straw that year was the uproar that followed disclosures that Representative Mark Foley of Florida had sent sexually suggestive messages to underage House pages.

Mr. Hastert and his inner circle were seen as not taking appropriate steps despite warnings of the activities of Mr. Foley and the furor in the final days before the November 2006 elections sealed the fate of both House Republicans and Mr. Hastert. He was re-elected to his own seat but dropped out of the leadership and took up residence in a private office in the Capitol, counting off the days until his retirement and a big-money lobbying career.

Now he is enmeshed in his own scandal, facing felony charges, public scrutiny and difficult questions about his behavior. There may be no good Hastert rule for dealing with all that.